The purpose of Foursquare

I’ve been working on semi-pro location based services since 2007, none successful so far, and have always considered “What’s the purpose and productivity-increasing elements of a location based service?”.

After listening to a guy that helps Foursquare, Twitter etc define their offerings and attitude towards the users, I was presented what Foursquare is supposedly about: Gaming!

According to him Foursquare is a game, nothing more nothing less. It has no real purpose beyond the game of becoming mayor. Just checking in to inform people who don’t care anyway is boring, but playing for the most mayorships and also get offerings from those places, is the actual purpose of using the service.

Is this also the reason Foursquare has overtaken e.g. Gowalla and similar services? Probably.